GreenHopper 5.8 is now available, delivering a huge win for everyone: the new Rapid Board!
A major innovation for GreenHopper, the Rapid Board is a flexible new board for managing and reporting on work in progress. The Rapid Board also provides multiple project support, which alone satisfies a whopping 255 votes – the most requested feature in GreenHopper’s history!
What is the Rapid Board?
The Rapid Board provides a new way to view issues in GreenHopper by creating Rapid Views. Creating new Rapid Views is simple:
- Save a Jira search
- Layout status columns
- Set Swimlanes & Quick Filters
This brilliant simplicity calls upon the most powerful search in issue tracking: Jira’s Query Language (JQL). The power of Jira’s advanced search is behind every aspect of the new GreenHopper Rapid Board. The Rapid View, horizontal Swimlanes and button Quick Filters are all based on JQL search parameters:
This means large teams can collaborate on a single Rapid View; while individuals can use Swimlanes and Quick Filters to see just the issues that matter most to them.
Work Smarter
The new Rapid Board has several smart features in the background. We’ve focused this first release of the Rapid Board on Kanban-specific features, and will continue to work on features for Scrum and all types agile teams as the Rapid Board evolves.
- Kanban presets: an Expedite swimlane, 3 Quick Filters, default columns (To Do, In Progress, Done), and issues ordered by Global Rank.
- Permanent links mean ‘what you see is what they get’ when emailing or IM’ing URLs – and include not only you exact view, but also the selected issue or report.
- Keyboard shortcuts let you perform any issue operation, including selecting an issue and ranking actions, without touching a mouse.
- Drop zones indicate the available transitions when moving an issue:
- Column headers stay with the board when scrolling down the page, so there’s no need to scroll back up to find information or take action.
- Issue cards have gotten an uplift: avatars show up indicating the card assignee, and the number of days in current status are indicated by dots across the card.
- Columns can have both a min and a max constraint: limit the amount of work in progress (WIP) for each column to keep the team moving things along.
Keep Issues Moving Across the Board
We’ve added a new Control Chart to show the mean cycle time and trends. Control Charts, along with the ‘time in status’ dots across issue cards, help teams spot outliers and understand which issues spend a long time in flight.
The Rapid Board views are also available as gadgets, so it’s easy to display this information on a Jira dashboard or a Confluence page. GreenHopper 5.8 is a huge step forward in understanding your teams work and communicating priorities and progress to the rest of the org. If you aren’t yet using GreenHopper or you want to see the new features in action, check out the short overview video.
Upgrade Jira & GreenHopper
GreenHopper 5.8 is available today, you’ll just need to upgrade to Jira 4.4.3 to take advantage of all the great new stuff! After you upgrade Jira, search your Jira plugin manager for the latest GreenHopper release.
This blog post and the overview video have been kindly translated by Atlassian partner //SEIBERT/MEDIA into German.